What’s a Screensaver?
January 31st, 2008 Sherill
softwarespread.com
A screensaver is a simple program that appears whenever you leave the mouse or keyboard unattended.
These screensavers were originally designed to protect the computer monitor from phosphor burn-ins. The phosphors that are used to make the pixels in the display would glow at a constant rate. If they are left for a certain period of time, they would actually discolor the glass surface of your monitor.
Today, screensavers are used for entertainment. Most people would use screensavers just for the fun of watching them. Some examples of these screensavers are natural environments like animated waterfalls or fishes, favorite actor/actress, cars, etc.
In relation to the previous post, here is a similar screensaver program that is worth trying. The World News Screensaver. This informative and up-to-date screensaver application generates the top and latest news articles through the Internet and uses an elegant 3D Earth Globe as its background image. The 3D Globe will show you the location of the news that is currently being shown. The World News Screensaver obviously provides significant world events straight to your computer. You are free to navigate the available news articles and if you want to view the full story, you just need to press a certain key that will launch your browser to display the complete news article. The World News Screensaver is worth $14.95.
Here is a very interesting and useful screensaver program that deserves some spot light. The News Screensaver, now on its version 2.01 is a screensaver application that lets you obtain the latest news, stock quotes and weather forecasts directly on your computer screen. All RSS, Atom and RDF formats are supported by this application. The News Screensaver is composed of a set of 100 links or more to different types of reliable news sources that cover various areas such as business, sports, regional, technology, industries, science and health. The News Screensaver program automatically checks for news feeds or updates given that you have a permanent Internet connection.
The screensaver industry underwent a huge booming stage during the time when most of the computer screens being used depended on CTR’s or cathode ray tubes. When an image is displayed for a long period of time on a CRT, the screen tends to permanently and gradually change. This leads to the common “ghost” image that appears on your old television set. With this sort of dilemma, the screensaver programs became popular because they helped avoid certain screen damages by consistently displaying images that change within periods of time during user inactivity. A screensaver may also activate certain background tasks such as distributed computing applications or virus scans that only uses small amounts of memory.
Screensavers of today have made great progress when it comes to functionalities. Screensavers are now capable of delivering Real Time Images on your computer screens. A known facility that uses a real time screensaver application is the Northwestern Transportation Center. Their main purpose for using a real time screensaver program is to display the Chicago Highway Traffic and Weather. The facility also wanted to display the Flight Delays and the National Weather. With the aid of an Internet connection, the Northwestern Real Time Transportation Screensaver was able to effectively distribute data to different users faster and more effectively as compared to RSS feeds.
Screensavers have many uses and security is one of them. There is a large number of programmed screensavers that may be configured to first ask for a password before allowing the user to continue with what he is doing. Perhaps providing security to your system is one of the most critical and significant roles of screensavers since it helps users in avoiding system infiltration that could possibly lead to leakage or stealing of confidential data. Users should not confuse the screensaver with the Windows Power Management Features because screensavers actually consume, if not waste, power while actively running on your system. It is recommended that you activate your screensaver for security purposes if you want to prevent other users from obtaining access to your system.
Are you loving the look and feel of Windows Vista screensaver but can not afford the memory cost Windows Vista OS requires? Worry not because you can still enjoy four of Windows Vista screensavers in your Windows XP OS (operating system). These screensavers are ported to XP descriptions. The four patched Vista screensavers can be downloaded from WinMatrix and Softpedia.